Google announced a series of updates are coming to Search Console in the next couple of months.
Along with these updates, Google has also made a “hard decision” to drop some legacy features in Search Console.
Here’s an overview of all the changes that are on the way.
New Features in Search Console
Google says the following new features will be fully implemented in Search Console toward the end of March.
Crawl Errors in Index Coverage Report
In an effort to make the list of crawl errors in Search Console more actionable, Google is shifting the focus toward issues and patterns used for site indexing.
With crawl errors being moved to the Index Coverage report, Google believes sites owners will be able to find and fix issues much faster.
Sitemaps Data in Index Coverage Report
The Index Coverage report will also be the new home for sitemaps data. Google says this will make it easier to focus on URLs that site owners care about.
Users will be able to track URLs submitted in sitemap files by selecting and filtering data in the Index Coverage report.
Fetch as Google via the URL Inspection Tool
Site owners can now use Search Console’s revamped URL inspection tool to check and review URLs on their website.
In addition to offering ‘Fetch as Google’ capabilities, the URL Inspection tool shows information such as HTTP headers, page resource, and the JavaScript console log.
The tool can also be used to submit images for re-processing in order to get them updated in search results as soon as possible.
User-management is Now in Settings
Search Console’s user management interface has been merged with the Settings section. This replaces the user-management features in the old Search Console.
Old Features Getting Removed
The following features are getting removed from Search Console. Some are being replaced, and some are going away altogether.
- Old Crawl Errors report: With crawl errors being included in the Index Coverage report, the old report is going to be removed.
- Crawl Errors API: Google is deprecating the crawl errors API, which was based on the same internal systems as the old crawl errors report. There is no replacement at the moment.
- HTML suggestions: As Google’s algorithms have gotten better at showing and improving titles over the years, Search Console will no longer show information about short and duplicated titles.
- Property Sets: This feature will be removed because it’s only being used by a small number of users. As a replacement, Google will soon add the option of managing a Search Console account over an entire domain.
- Android Apps: This feature will be removed as most of the relevant functionality has been moved to the Firebase console.
- Blocked Resources: This standalone section will be removed as blocked resources can now be found in the URL inspection tool.
- Structured Data reporting: Structured Data types that are not supported with Rich Results features will not be reported in Search Console anymore.
Google welcomes feedback in its help forums regarding any of these changes.
More Resources
- A Complete Guide to the Google Search Console
- 5 Actionable Reports from the New Google Search Console
- A Complete Guide to Google Analytics
